Issue #174

March 23 2017

Editor Picks

A new “Mathematician’s Apology”In the two and a half years (or so) since I left academia for industry, I’ve worked with a number of math majors and math PhDs outside of academia and talked to a number of current grad students who were considering going into industry. As a result, my perspective on the role of the math research community within the larger world has changed quite a bit from what it was in the early days of may academic career. In the post below, I explore this new perspective...

Algorithms Tour: How data science is woven into the fabric of Stitch FixAt Stitch Fix, we’re transforming the way people find what they love. Our clients want the perfect clothes for their individual preferences—yet without the burden of search or having to keep up with current trends. Our merchandise is curated from the market and augmented with our own designs to fill in the gaps. It’s kept current and extremely vast and diverse—ensuring something for everyone. Rich data on both sides of this 'market' enables Stitch Fix to be a matchmaker, connecting clients with styles they love (and never would’ve found on their own). ...

The Golden Age of Data Science [podcast]
How did one boy’s stuffed yellow elephant permanently intertwine itself in history? What is a data scientist? Why is right now the golden age for data science? We take a crack at all three of these questions—the second two, with the help of Gregory Piatetsky-Shapiro and Ryan Henning...

A Message from this week's Sponsor:

Interact with experts in AI, deep learning, healthcare and machine learning at the annual Deep Learning Summit and Deep Learning in Healthcare Summit in Boston, 25-26 May. Companies showcasing the opportunities of advancing trends in deep learning and the impact on business and society include: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Philips Research and Harvard Medical School.

Early Bird Passes end 31 March so don’t miss out on this big saving! Register here.

Data Science Articles & Videos

Machine Learning Invades The Real World On Internet BalloonsAlphabet’s wacky-sounding plan to deliver the internet to the world’s farthest-flung places via giant balloons—is even closer to reality than the company previously thought. It’s cool that these balloons may soon start broadcasting internet signals from the stratosphere. But the bigger deal here is that machine learning is moving beyond its digital origins into the real world...

Isochrones using the Google Maps Distance Matrix APII wrote a Python module called isocronut that will calculate isochrones around an origin point...In order to generate isochrones such as these, I made use of the Google Maps API. If you've never used the Google Maps API before, well then, buddy, now's your chance...

Who is that Neural Network?Pokémon has been an enormous success around the globe for more than 20 years. In this paper, I tackle the “Who’s that Pokémon?” challenge from a machine learning perspective. I propose a machine learning pre-processing and classification pipeline, using convolutional neural networks for classification of Pokémon sprites...

Which GPU(s) to Get for Deep Learning:
My Experience and Advice for Using GPUs in Deep Learning - UPDATED With a good, solid GPU, one can quickly iterate over deep learning networks, and run experiments in days instead of months, hours instead of days, minutes instead of hours. So making the right choice when it comes to buying a GPU is critical. So how do you select the GPU which is right for you? This blog post will delve into that question and will lend you advice which will help you to make choice that is right for you...

Deck.gl – Data VisualizationI tried installing Deck.gl, MapBox, implement some code, take a deep understand in GLSL. Tried to visualize VisaH1B static, Flight record, Taxi route. All datasets are available on Kaggle which under CC license. And now, it’s time to write blog for sharing my experiment...

Jobs

VSCO is a leading creative platform with a monthly audience of over 45 million and growing.

We are looking for a Senior Data Analyst to build data at VSCO from the ground up. You will design our data model for user behavior and content impression, and will mine the data to find insights that will influence the product roadmap. Expect to get your hands dirty with Redshift, Spark, and data visualization tools under the guidance of our Director of Data Science...

Training & Resources

Building Safe A.I. - A Tutorial for Encrypted Deep Learning In this blogpost, we're going to train a neural network that is fully encrypted during training (trained on unencrypted data). The result will be a neural network with two beneficial properties. First, the neural network's intelligence is protected from those who might want to steal it, allowing valuable AIs to be trained in insecure environments without risking theft of their intelligence. Secondly, the network can only make encrypted predictions...

A Gentle Guide to Machine LearningThis post will try to give the novice reader a brief introduction to Machine Learning. I’ll give a general overview of important concepts, applications and challenges when working with Machine Learning...

Static and Dynamic Data and Web Pages
You can make a d3.json XHR type specific AJAX call to get and then use data from a server using D3. In this video, we are going to cover how this works, what it is doing and what to pay attention to when using D3. We will also cover how to think about, load and use static and dynamic data sets in static and dynamic web pages...

Books

"The best single book on Data Science today. I handle the data analysis and BI for the delivery side of a huge internet-based retail company, and have been a fan of Foreman's since his "Analytics Made Skeezy" blog days. His explanations are clear, his examples are to the point, and throughout it all, he is results-oriented."...